Intel ARC Alchemist stand-alone notebook GPU exposed, has 512 Xe cores

Benchleaks found multiple entries in Geekbench for Intel’s flagship ARC Alchemist GPU, which uses the Xe-HPG graphics architecture. Intel ARC Alchemist flagship GPU is equipped with 512 Xe cores and is an independent mobile chip for high-end gaming notebooks.

Intel ARC Alchemist GPU will enter the consumer field of desktop and notebook computers in the first quarter of 2022. We have seen various plans for these chips before the launch from earlier reports. Intel has been evaluating its next-generation graphics modules on the Rocket Lake, Tiger Lake and Alder Lake platforms. The latest work was tested on the Tiger Lake 11th generation reference platform.

ARC Alchemist GPU has 512 Xe cores (computing units), which is equivalent to 4096 ALUs. The chip's clock frequency is 1800MHz, which is said to be the highest frequency it can achieve, but considering that this is still an early sample, Intel has used TSMC 's latest 6-nanometer process node, and the final clock frequency may be higher.

As for the performance of this particular variant, it is a 4.5 times increase from the last entry of the same chip, which shows that the early benchmarks are still from earlier chips, and its drivers are not really optimized at all. Even so, these drivers are still not up to the level we will see in the final sample, but you can see that performance is definitely improving in this particular benchmark. At the same time, the ARC Alchemist 512 core chip is 88% faster than the previously leaked 256 core SKU. This is almost a linear expansion of dual cores.

The fact that Intel tested on Tiger Lake laptops may or may not be that important. This may suggest that Intel plans to launch ARC Alchemist GPUs on Tiger Lake-H laptops first,But this may also be just their evaluation of the performance on the Tiger Lake reference motherboard. Initially, they believe that the final model will be integrated on the Alder Lake-H laptop, but if the Alder Lake laptop is shipped in the second or third quarter of 2022, Then the Tiger Lake-H update and ARC Alchemist GPU in the middle are reasonable.

compares with and AMD GPU, its performance is still not satisfactory. The performance of this flagship product is comparable to the AMD RX 500 and NVIDIA GTX 1650 series, and these two cards are indeed very old now. Similarly, Intel’s ARC Alchemist GPU lineup will be launched in about 6-8 months, so they still have a lot of time to optimize properly.